A Bazaari's World

To understand Iran—and perhaps even the future of other parts of the Islamic world—one must understand a man like Mohsen Rafiqdoost

By Robert D. Kaplan

February 1, 1979, was the most important day in the life of Mohsen Rafiqdoost. On that day the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran by plane from a fourteen-year exile imposed by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had left two
weeks earlier. Khomeini's plane arrived from Paris. The route from the airport
to downtown Tehran was lined with adoring millions. Rafiqdoost pulled his car
up to the plane. He was to be Khomeini's driver and the chief of Khomeini's
personal-security detail.

I met Rafiqdoost during a visit to Iran not long ago, and we spent more than
two hours talking in his Tehran office. He seemed every bit the bodyguard.
Energy and aggression rippled from his compact, slightly stocky physique as he
sat on the edge of his chair, tapping his foot and banging his thigh with his
fist, and nodding his head whenever he had a point to make. Rafiqdoost has a
short salt-and-pepper beard and thin straight hair that is only now, in his mid-fifties, showing signs of receding. His profile is vaguely feral, in a way that
makes him look menacing without making him ugly. His small, beetle-shell eyes
radiate a playful dangerousness.

During our meeting Rafiqdoost straddled the line between suave and sleazy. He
could almost have passed for a nightclub bouncer. He wore a designer-quality
striped shirt, a well-tailored black sports jacket, and gray slacks. His beard
was neatly clipped. On his feet, though, were rubber beach thongs—a high-quality
brand like the kind sold in L. L. Bean catalogues. Rafiqdoost apologized for the
thongs. "I forgot that a visitor was expected. They are more comfortable to work
in."

He was quite serious about the work. Around his desktop computer was a clutter
of notes and documents, upon which lay a pair of reading glasses with
fashionable frames. Iran, somewhat like Turkey, and unlike most places in the
Third World, is a place where office desks are used for real work rather than
merely for the display of petty bureaucratic power. The desk and the office
managed to be impressive nonetheless, with fashionable olive-gray chairs and a
Sony television set.

Rafiqdoost is definitely a man of parts, and a dynamic one at that—as talented
and dangerous with his computer as he is with his fists. That is why I wanted
to see him. For Rafiqdoost had not only been Khomeini's chief bodyguard. He
also played a key role in forming the Revolutionary Guards that brutally
crushed secular moderates and members of the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq
(People's Holy Warriors), among other supposed enemies of the Islamic
Revolution. Rafiqdoost now controls something called the Bonyad-e Mostazafan
(Foundation of the Oppressed), Iran's largest holding company. The Bonyad is
made up of some 1,200 firms, and was established with money confiscated from
the Shah's family and from prominent industrialists who fled the revolution.
One Iranian, no fan of Rafiqdoost's, calls this foundation—ostensibly an
operation to help the poor—"the greatest cartel in history." Rafiqdoost is, in
all probability, worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

When I entered his office, he offered me his hand as if from a podium. He had
little modesty. He knew his importance.

How Rafiqdoost happened to be behind the wheel of that Chevy Blazer the day
Khomeini returned to Iran, how he took control of a substantial part of the
Shah's fortune, and how he converted that fortune into an even bigger financial
empire—these are things for which a Marxist would have a ready answer: they
are the result of Rafiqdoost's socio-economic class. In this case the Marxist
would be right. Rafiqdoost is a bazaari, a member of the class of people
who helped make the Iranian Revolution.

Ironically, the Marxist probably never
would have identified the bazaaris as a social class in the first place.
This is because Marxists see classes only as they relate to the means of
production, not as they actually function. As Nikki R. Keddi has pointed out, in
Roots of Revolution, bazaaris don't fall into any of the usual
categories.The worker in a hole-in-the-wall shop in the bazaar is certainly in a
position different from that of a big moneylender in the bazaar. But both the
laborer and the moneylender are bazaaris. They are both involved in petty
trade of a traditional, or nearly traditional, kind, centered on the bazaar and
its Islamic culture. At least, that has been the usual definition of bazaari.

Bazaar is a Persian word that means "market." Westerners often use it
interchangeably with the Arabic word souk for markets throughout Muslim
North Africa and the Near East. The bazaar is often the first place tourists
head for, in order to lose themselves in serpentine alleys lined with shops,
sometimes built under picturesque archways—as in Tunis or Jerusalem—conjuring
up the cliché of the "fabulous East." Although Western goods are sold in
the bazaar, and bazaaris sell souvenirs to Western tourists and smile
before their cameras, real Westernization—supermarkets, department stores,
machine-made goods, large banks—threatens the bazaari's livelihood. The smile
before the camera, therefore, is often a deceptive one.

But bazaaris are not simply the men behind the stalls in the picturesque
Oriental market. According to a relatively new definition that has taken hold
among academics and journalists in the past few decades, bazaaris as a
social class can exist only in places where the society is in the midst of an
awkward modernization; where the bazaar is in some stage of transition between
the world of A Thousand and One Nights and that of the suburban shopping
mall; where the welder's sparks singe the classic image of turbaned men
inhaling tobacco smoke from hubble-bubbles.

Bazaaris, therefore, though age-old in the historical sense, are
relatively new in the political sense. The Muslim Brotherhood—the Ikhwan—in
Egypt is heavily backed by bazaari types. Although that organization, so
dangerous to pro-Western regimes in the Near East, consists largely of narrowly
educated men of peasant background, it is the better-educated sons of traditional
bazaaris, like Rafiqdoost, being a slight step up on the social ladder, who
often lead the narrowly educated men in trying to topple an established order.

In other words, bazaaris constitute a sort of newly established Islamic
petty bourgeoisie. They must compete with more-experienced Christian and Jewish
merchants, both in and outside the bazaar. This competition quickens the
bazaaris' resentments, which are often similar to those that were in
evidence among the petty bourgeoisie in Europe during the age of
industrialization.

The Near East at the end of the twentieth century is, of course, a region in
great social turmoil and economic transition, as Europe was throughout the
nineteenth century and in the twentieth until the Second World War. Bazaari
typesare increasingly significant politically, as the case of the
Muslim Brotherhood suggests. "Rafiqdoost," an Iranian friend explained, "is an
absolute bazaari through and through": a boy of the streets who learned
math with a scratch pad at his father's fruit stand. In the Muslim Near East,
especially in Iran, only a bazaari could assume the roles of both
bodyguard and financier.

What has distinguished Iranian bazaaris from those in other
fast-changing societies in the Islamic world is their close links with the
clergy, or ulama, a relationship that developed during the nineteenth
century under the rule of the Qajar shahs. As Nikki Keddie writes,

Ulama and bazaaris often belonged to the same families; much ulama income came
from levies paid mainly by bazaaris; the guilds often celebrated religious or
partly religious ceremonies for which the services of ulama were needed; and
piety and religious observance were among the signs of bazaar standing or
leadership. (Even today respectable bazaar shopkeepers and moneylenders are
often addressed as "Hajji," whether or not the speaker knows if the addressee
has made a pilgrimage justifying this form of address.) Entry into the ulama
through study was an avenue of upward social mobility and entailed more respect
than entry into Qajar service. Mosques and shrines [located close to the
bazaar] were a major area of bast (refuge) for individuals and groups

But the bazaari looks at religion from a businessman's point of view. As
one Iranian acquaintance explained, "The bazaari is willing to bend the
rules of religion for the sake of finance." The so-called hypocrisy and corruption
of the Iranian clergy sometimes stem from the bazaari backgrounds of many
of the mullahs.

"Describe a stereotypical bazaari," I asked a longtime foreign resident
of Tehran who speaks Persian. He answered, putting it in the form of a
caricature, "A bazaari is a fat guy with meaty hands and fingers like
kebabs, with gold rings on them. He sits in his shop and sips tea. He trades.
He makes a lot of money and he prays several times a day. He comes home at
night to a big, expensive house with nothing of taste in it, where he has a
wife who slaves for him."

"Yes, I am a bazaari ," a vendor in the Tehran bazaar told me. "I buy and sell
things."

"In other words, you are a thief," interjected the vendor next to him,
laughing.

Vahid, the son of a mullah in Tehran, told me, "A bazaari will say to
himself, 'I am a man of God who prays very often, so if I say that such and
such a carpet that I wish to sell to you is worth so-many rials, that is the true worth of the carpet, since a religious man like me would never lie.' Because the bazaari is religious, he believes that he is always right." He went on, "The word for 'beard' in Persian can be pashm, which also means 'wool.' The bazaari, while stroking his beard, will say to a customer regarding a carpet for sale, 'Yes, this is made of very good wool.'"

The bazaar where Rafiqdoost grew up is the quintessential bazaar in transition:
a labyrinthine world of corrugated iron roofs, brick archways, and plate glass
in the midst of a poor working-class region of South Tehran. It lacks any trace
of beauty—save for the eighteenth-century Imam Khomeini Mosque (formerly the
Shah Mosque) at its center—and is filled with every manner of goods, from
chadors and carpets to pots and pans to radios and television sets to
American candy bars.

Rafiqdoost grew up as not just a bazaari but, more specifically, a
meydani ("person of the square"): someone who worked in the
fruit-and-vegetable market and therefore had few business connections with
Westerners or their companies—of the sort that, for example, a seller of
expensive carpets or electronic goods would have had. Yet Rafiqdoost's clan is
not unsophisticated: members of his extended family include doctors and
engineers. Rafiqdoost's brother used to run another of the handful of large
revolutionary foundations established with money confiscated from the Shah.

"I was born in South Tehran, near the bazaar, to a very religious family close
to the Imam," Rafiqdoost told me. "I was always pro-Imam. I am a self-made
man. I was not allowed to enter university, because I was expelled from high
school in 1953, when I was thirteen, for pro-Mosaddeq activities. [Mohammad Mosaddeq
was the Iranian Prime Minister who nationalized Western oil companies in 1951 and was
subsequently overthrown in a 1953 coup organized, in part, by the Central Intelligence
Agency.] Anti-Shah sentiment was something I learned in my home growing up. In 1976 I
was jailed for political reasons. Four months before the revolution, in 1978, I was
released when the people stormed the prisons [as part of the series of
demonstrations that culminated in the Shah's downfall]. Immediately after
leaving prison I became a contact point for anti-regime people, and for distributing
the Imam's decrees from Paris. I was also hiding people from the Shah's police. When
the Imam decided to return to Iran, a revolutionary council was organized. I was given
the task of logistics and personal security for the Imam. That's when I decided that I
myself would be the Imam's driver." Though Rafiqdoost is not now known for violence, his
past leadership of the violent Revolutionary Guards demonstrates to all in Iran his
capacity for it.

I asked Rafiqdoost about the financial particulars of the Bonyad, the
Foundation of the Oppressed, whose 1,200 companies are involved in mining,
housing construction, transportation, hotels, and tourism. In 1993, Rafiqdoost
said, the Bonyad made a profit of 250 billion rials, or, in 1993 terms, roughly
$100 million. "The first part of our profits go for the victims of the Shah and
the wounded in the eight-year war with Iraq. The second part is for high schools in
poor areas, for public-health clinics, for clothes for five hundred thousand needy
students. The third part is for reinvesting."

I did not doubt the foundation's commitment to the needy and the war wounded.
The amputee who operated the elevator that took me up to Rafiqdoost's office
was only one of a number of handicapped young men I saw working there. But the
Foundation of the Oppressed, as the largest holding company in an oil-producing
country of about 65 million people, has gargantuan amounts of real estate,
cash, and other assets. It is a state within a state. The foundation's
headquarters, where I met with Rafiqdoost, consists of three new office towers
of polished white stone; I had to pass through two heavily guarded checkpoints
in order to enter the complex. It was more impressive than any government
ministry I saw in Tehran.

Were the amputees who were employed inside, along with the charity work and the
whole aura of do-goodism exemplified by the foundation's very name, merely
façades—like the milk factory that was thought to be a cover for a
chemical-weapons facility in Iraq? Was the foundation's emphasis on helping the
"oppressed" the tactical equivalent of putting a terrorists' training facility near
a school or hospital, as was done in Lebanon?

I asked myself such cynical questions because the Foundation of the Oppressed
and other revolutionary foundations established with the Shah's money are
answerable only to the "Supreme Leader" of Iran, the Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i,
to whose home Rafiqdoost says he goes to pray. Iran's elected President, Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has little control over the foundation's activities.
The ability of the Central Bank of Iran to tax the foundation, or to monitor
its foreign-currency flows—let alone audit its activities—is close to nil. In
the view of a Washington-based analyst, "Rafiqdoost is a New Age
bazaari, with few of the redeeming virtues of his forefathers. He is a
mobster-trader: a dark, rootless master monopolist." Who can say to what groups
in the Middle East and elsewhere Rafiqdoost may be sending checks? Rafiqdoost
and Khameneh'i can. Khameneh'i's photograph hangs in a large and ornate gold
frame in Rafiqdoost's office, next to a similarly framed photograph of Imam
Khomeini. Conspicuous by its absence is a picture of President Rafsanjani,
whose cabinet includes American-educated technocrats who for years have tried
unsuccessfully, because of insufficient political clout, to move Iran closer to the
West.

But the possibility that Rafiqdoost is operating a financial and logistical
clearinghouse for international terrorism was less intriguing to me than the
possibility that the Foundation of the Oppressed represents a new kind of
economic organization in a new kind of emerging state. Such a state will be
well suited to the porous borders and the political chaos of the region. The
empire to Iran's north, the Soviet Union, has collapsed, bringing into
existence a collection of weakly governed fiefdoms in Central Asia; the state
to the east, Afghanistan, has disintegrated into landlocked emirates based on
drug trafficking; the state to the west, Iraq, an artificial construct of
European colonialism, is a veritable penitentiary facing eventual explosion and
possible collapse; and the state to the northwest, Turkey, is engaged in a
violent struggle between Turks and Kurds over the ethnic duality of its
Anatolian land mass.

Might the most enduring legacy of the Islamic Revolution be the bazaari nature of the Iranian economy? The bazaaris have created a political
and economic system that is a larger version of the South Tehran bazaar. The
Bonyad and the other foundations are expanded versions of the wholesalers and
retailers with whom small shopkeepers are not in a position to compete, because
they can't afford the bribes and don't have the connections. The alliance
between bazaaris and clergy now exists at a higher level too. As in the
bazaar, the rules are far more flexible and contradictory than those that any
nation-state system familiar to a Westerner would ever tolerate. Some
enterprises may import and export dollars; some may not. Some can do it at this
rate of exchange; others must do it at that rate of exchange.

The ancient and informal roadside-banking system in Iran is often more reliable
than the official banking system, where one might deposit money today and find
that it can't be withdrawn tomorrow, unless the teller is bribed. Huge profits
are being hidden and spent on who knows what. But that doesn't mean the poor
have been forgotten. Like traditional bazaaris, all the corporate
bazaaris give alms. (I didn't see more than a few beggars during an
entire month in Iran.) Rafiqdoost, I mean to suggest, is still the fruit
seller. He goes over his books with a computer rather than a scratch pad. As a
devout Muslim, he gives a generous portion of his proceeds to the needy. He
deals with the authorities on an informal after-hours basis. Here is a murky cosmos
of deals and mutual favors for which written laws have yet to be drafted.

The bazaar isn't so much filling a void in post-revolutionary Iran as it is defining
the chaos. The most telling fact about the Iran of the mid-1990s is that the system
of competing power centers bequeathed by the revolution is breaking down, and yet
nothing, and no one, is even remotely on the horizon to serve as a replacement. The
monarchy, an institution with which Iranians had a troubled history long before the Shah,
has been discredited. The military is possibly too deeply divided to take back power.
As for democracy, the freely elected parliament is merely a venue for factionalism and
attacks against the government. True, the present ruling coalition of radical mullahs
and the security services could fissure, leaving the parliament and the presidential
cabinet in control. Such a development would hardly bring stability. And if, as
is more likely in the short run, the power of the mullahs under Ali Khameneh'i
increases, then so will the influence of the bazaaris, and of their way
of doing things. But there are limits to how much even this regime can get away
with. If any recent event demonstrates the fragility of Iran's quickly
ossifying revolutionary system, it is the conviction late last year of eight
businessmen closely connected with the ruling clerics, including Rafiqdoost's
brother, Morteza, on charges of stealing and embezzling as much as $400
million. The public outcry made it impossible for the regime to protect even
its own moneymen. One of the eight was hanged, and Rafiqdoost's brother got a
life sentence. Rafiqdoost himself was sufficiently threatened that Ali
Khameneh'i had to reaffirm him publicly as the head of the Foundation of the
Oppressed.

Nevertheless, while observing and listening to Rafiqdoost, I wondered, Might
this be normality? Might this be it ? Might Iran constitute a culture
that is too urbane and sophisticated for a one-man thugocracy like the ones that
obtain next door in Iraq and Syria, yet not sophisticated enough for a reasonably
functioning and stable democracy? Is Iran—like so many other entities in the
Middle East and Central Asia—evolving into something neither authoritarian nor
democratic nor even organized the way a state is ordinarily thought to be? I could not
escape the conviction that the twenty-first century will see the implosion of political Islam and the rise of the Islamic bazaar state.